


For the Sake of the Trust (The Stratigraphic Predecessor Remix)

by sanguinity



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Episode: s02e06 An Unnatural Arrangement, Gen, References to Addiction, Remix, Story: The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-21
Updated: 2015-06-21
Packaged: 2018-04-05 05:43:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4168074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/pseuds/sanguinity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joan and Sherlock, waiting for the Restoration.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For the Sake of the Trust (The Stratigraphic Predecessor Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hophophop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hophophop/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Archaeology](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1401580) by [hophophop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hophophop/pseuds/hophophop). 



> > _In my inmost heart I believed that I could succeed where others failed, and now I had the opportunity to test myself._  
>       — The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual
>> 
>> _I've already given them my all, so there’s little risk that I will arrive at a solution before you. You might even succeed where I have failed._  
>       — An Unnatural Arrangement
> 
> In "[Archaeology](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1401580)," hophophop drew her central metaphor from the episode that introduced the trunk of cold cases (2x06, “An Unnatural Arrangement”), and paired that image with the trunk itself in order to explore Joan and Sherlock’s pasts, secrets, and relationship. 
> 
> However, Holmes’s trunk of pre-Watson cases lives a dual life: it is also an ACD canon element drawn from "[The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Musgrave_Ritual)." ( _"They are not all successes, Watson, but there are some pretty little problems among them."_ ) For this remix, I drew upon MUSG for a metaphor to pair with the trunk. The full text of the ritual is in the notes at the end, but this remix draws heavily on the canon case; familiarity with it would be helpful. 
> 
> I am a thieving magpie, and all the good words were cribbed from Arthur Conan Doyle, [Elizabeth Bishop](http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/one-art), and hophophop. Many thanks to my betas, language-escapes and grrlpup. All remaining infelicities are my own.

The trunk of cold cases obstructed Sherlock’s and Watson’s passage through the brownstone, forcing them to do-si-do whenever they needed to bypass it: stepping aside and exchanging places, repeating the sequence to return where they began. The maneuver became so smooth and practiced—two steps to the south, one step to the west, Watson ducking under his outstretched arm—that it was almost possible for Sherlock to forget what they danced around.

But only almost: Sherlock was not practiced in the art of forgetting. A detective has no opportunity to train on the small things—a set of keys, his mother’s watch—and he found the art impossible to master.

(Watson was more accomplished: Sherlock was scandalized to learn that Watson had succeeded in forgetting Angus during the time he spent guarding _watsonia_ on the roof. Forgotten him for _months_. Sherlock assigned her extra reading.)

The trunk was a rebuke, a memento of Sherlock’s sole “success” at forgetting: the relics of a man so far gone in his attempt to forget his failures, that he had forgotten his duties as well. Oh, at the height of his addiction he had accepted cases—and more importantly to him at the time, the money that went with them—but once retained for a case, he walked through the motions of investigation, diminishing the noble calling of detection to a ritual of no practical use beyond preserving his self-delusions. Upon completing his stint at Helmdale, he had made a belated attempt to discharge his duties, but his attempt to reopen the files had exposed the fragile sites in his new sobriety. Ultimately, he had boxed the files away again, keeping them for some stronger, restored self, one that he hoped would someday come.

Instead, Watson came.

He seldom saw her work the cases; Watson took care, after that first evening, to keep the files themselves out of his sight. Her circumspection eased the exchange for them both, protecting her uncertain skills from his scrutiny and his battered pride from hers. One morning, coming into her room with her breakfast, he glimpsed one of his old cases tucked under her pillow, kept safe even as she slept. Even through his self-loathing, he felt an unexpected tenderness for her. He could not abide treating himself gently, but she protected his private self against trespass as diligently as she protected her own.

Watson’s protection of her own privacy was formidable, of course. She had built a figurative stone keep in which to store her secrets, hiding them away in the deepest, oldest cellars she could reach. Unfortunately, there is nothing more obvious than a fortress. Parking tickets in her purse and the scent of carnations on her cuffs: she could have not have marked the location of her secrets more clearly if she had stashed them under a flagstone with a massive iron ring in it.

Regrettably, Sherlock had been trained from a young age that buttons exist for pushing. Handles, just as obviously, exist for pulling.

He had not been prepared for her impassioned defense, when she collapsed the full weight of his failures on his head. Later that night, after the weight of his inadequacies proved beyond his strength, he sat alone in his cell at Central Holding, resigned to the certainty that he had been abandoned to his fate.

Only to find himself the object of a miracle: she came for him.

Very few miracles are panaceas. The trust between them was fragile, and he trespassed against her secrets, surveilling her friends, dates, and family, as she trespassed against his, charming his confidantes and counselors into confession. The trusts between them broke and built, only to break again. But then, after he willfully and spectacularly destroyed it all, a second miracle occurred: she stayed for him.

He stepped back and reconsidered her, then. A brilliant, dedicated surgeon, her career struck by lightning but still viable. And yet she had cut the remainder of it away, denying her vocation and title as if they had never been. But in stark contrast to her ruthless termination of her medical career, she had taken an unsalvageable relationship and reshaped its wreckage into her new profession. The job provided easy cover for her desire for privacy: her clients too self-absorbed to see her, the contracts too short to know her, and client confidentiality a bomb-proof excuse for withholding her life from anyone who loved her. She had rebuilt her entire life around moving on. She should have been off like a shot, the moment she was satisfied he wouldn’t self-destruct again.

Instead, she lingered. Despite having every reason to move on—the lack of income, the threats to her life, the client who would not respect her privacy—she lingered.

When Sherlock made his proposal, he imagined that as she shed her dull and lustreless life as a sober companion, the spark he glimpsed in her would shine clearly, restored to its former brilliance. He had been correct, so far as it went: solving a puzzle made her glow with accomplishment, her exacting standards once again having a vital use. Joan Watson had a new vocation, and she publicly claimed the title that went with it.

And yet the new career failed to resolve _her._ Her things remained in storage, kept against the day when… what? Sherlock didn’t think even Watson knew. He worried that her reticence was no longer a matter of will. If there had ever been a map to how she had hidden herself, he suspected she had lost track of it, and had long ago stopped looking for it.

It was a conundrum, especially for a man whose only skill was revealing hidden things. Unfortunately, that skill wasn’t wanted. He couldn’t move that flagstone on his own; at most, he could provide assistance if the work required two. Left on his own, he could do no more than mark the location of her secrets and safeguard them against the day she either retrieved them or discarded them entirely.

He limited himself to small actions only, as non-invasive as possible. He kept an eye on the storage facility’s bills as they passed through the brownstone, confirming that they were paid: Watson’s history would never be allowed to be sold at auction to some Milverton-wannabe. Similarly, he arranged for the regular inspection of her locker’s exterior: if some enterprising thief were to cut off Watson’s lock and replace it with his own, Sherlock would be informed promptly. As their partnership progressed and the sites of her other secrets became known to him, he established protocols for watching over them as well.

He marked them, and guarded them, and waited for the changing wind when Watson—perhaps this one he knew, or some future version he couldn’t yet envision—would seek to have them restored to her.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Whose was it?   _His who is gone._  
>  Who shall have it?   _He who will come._  
>  Where was the sun?   _Over the oak._  
>  Where was the shadow?   _Under the elm._  
>  How was it stepped?   _North by ten and by ten, east by five and by five, south by two and by two, west by one and by one, and so under._  
>  What shall we give for it?   _All that is ours._  
>  Why should we give it?   _For the sake of the trust._


End file.
